aandon

I've been using them in SF and it's a nice perk to not have to worry about filling up. The bigger perk is just having someone more diligent than myself checking all the stuff I let get too far: wipers, tire treads, headlights, etc

aaaaaaand it's not on the App Store

My guess is sellers absorb this as a cost of doing business. As long as fraud rates remain in low single digit percentage, it's probably not worth it for the seller or Amazon to fight it.

It is always fun to dissect these scams. There's an interesting e-commerce scam prevalent in India that popped up as the country embraced e-commerce without much credit card infrastructure in place (most online orders are paid to the delivery person in cash) https://simility.com/delivery-fraud:

"The fraudster businesses ordered hundreds of products from the victim’s website to be delivered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, if customers came into their store asking for an out-of-stock product, they were told it would be in stock later that day. Then the fraudsters paid the delivery person in cash for the small fraction of products they had pre-sold to customers, while returning the vast majority of unsold products without paying for them at the cost of the e-commerce company, thus completing the delivery fraud cycle."

Great Snowden interview (by Neil deGrasse Tyson) where he explains why collecting "only metadata" is no excuse: https://soundcloud.com/startalk/a-conversation-with-edward-s...

Agreed, the best thing you can do is Google "_____ product review" and look for credible reviewers, someone with a reputation to protect. I worked with a product company where v1 had some product flaws and started receiving negative reviews, but it was very easy to overwhelm those with fake positive reviews across the web. Then when we came out with a much better v2, we got a scientist in our field with some following to do a short positive video review. That is difficult to get (I'm not talking about YouTube/Instagram/mommy blogger reviewers who give positive reviews to anyone who will send them free product) and there's no way he would have put his name on the line unless he had tried out the product on his own extensively. Any product company worth its salt should know this and get a few of these expert reviews posted to the web.

Indeed I know it's a close-knit community. Most of our 20-person team came from anti-fraud teams at Google. I'm guessing the "silliness" you're referring to is the talk of Facebook not being incentivized to block spammers. I think kbenson articulated best what I was trying to say, that there are tradeoffs in blocking good users and decreasing apparent user volume when fighting fraud. Facebook would obviously not be wise to catch every single fraudster because there would be a high number of false positives, so a balance must be struck. As I'm sure you know, fraud teams at many companies often clash with the marketing team because they're protecting the bottom line (sometimes at the expense of the top line) respectively, and vice versa.

> The incentive to make fake accounts on Facebook is orders of magnitude greater than almost any other social network.

Not true. In the article, the writer pays Russell $15 for 1,000 likes. Being generous and assuming each of Russell's fake accounts can farm out 100 fake likes, he's making $1.50 per fake account before it gets shut down. Compare that to social networks where you can directly extract payments from other members by listing fake items for sale, laundering payments from fake credit cards (on other fake profiles) to yourself, or link-baiting other users. A single successful fake account on those networks can easily net you $100.

> Facebook has methods that radically exceed this method in both complexity, precision, and recall.

Agreed, and indeed Simility's models have much more complex methods too, but a) I wanted to post an interesting example everyone here would understand and b) I still say Facebook is not using anywhere near its full ability to stop these fake profiles given how rampant this fraud scheme is on their platform. (Again, follow the money, FB has very little incentive to stop these fraudsters who are only inflating their own numbers. It's important to keep them in check, but there's no incentive to waste resources stopping them.)

Product manager at fraud detection company Simility here. I'm very surprised Facebook hasn't put more effort into curbing fake accounts, makes me think it's very low priority for them. We have social network customers who are much smaller than FB, yet have gotten their fake account rates far below FB's.

One effective strategy we've employed not mentioned here is category mapping: if an account of type A, only targets accounts of type B for likes (especially if they ignore categories C, D, etc.), this is usually a high indicator of fraud. For example, one very common strategy is to create a fake account for an attractive female to friend many male accounts (especially relatively new accounts unaware of these tactic). This can be easily detected by analyzing the gender and account age of all targets and coming up with a diversity score. Low diversity score = likely fraudster.

Normally an order on your back-end is linked to our device ID with a session ID. However our device ID can also accept user-generated data within fields on your website/mobile app. So if your customers enter their email address during your checkout process, that email will be tied to device ID and you can then look up suspicious orders by their email address.

PM from a fraud detection company here. One thing I didn't see mentioned on this thread is Device ID, which is very common on fraud detection platforms. When a user comes to your website or mobile app, you have access to hundreds of signals from their device. Some like IP address are easy to spoof. Others like whether the user has changed their phone alarm from the default settings are often ignored by fraudsters but surprisingly telling signals (fraudsters don't bother to change from default settings). We wrote an article on some interesting findings recently here: https://simility.com/device-recon-results/. A good device ID product can not only tell if the same fraudster is accessing your app repeatedly while pretending to be different users, it can detect risky user profiles when they land on your app. Before they even make a payment.

Google Sketchup is an unsophisticated but good quick-and-dirty modeling app. It wouldn't be a huge leap to see it built in a CSS framework like this.

The professionalization of the peer-to-peer space is getting incredibly interesting. Hotels must be realizing that hosts are starting to offer places that are essentially like hotels... only with much more diversity, many more locations, more unique features. Tools like this are definitely driving some interesting changes in the space.

Interesting idea, this is the first virtual hackathon I've ever seen. Wonder if this is the first time someone's ever tried this. Could be huge

I'm really sorry to hear about your disappointing experience with the tank. We can set you up with some suppliers in Europe that you might not have tried yet. The jellies definitely should not die within a few days! If you want to email us I'll make sure you get taken care of.

We started the company on volusion but have since switched to Get Fwd (http://getfwd.com/) because we had to customize order and fulfillment logic due to the time sensitive nature of our live animal shipments.

I'm a big environmentalist and supporter of animal rights. I originally wanted to be a marine biologist when I graduated college.

But I don't think keeping jellyfish in captivity is unethical. They're somewhere between a goldfish and a houseplant in terms of sentience. They have no central nervous system; just a loosely connected net of nerves that control their muscle contractions and very simple senses, like swimming towards light and migrating up in the water column at night and down during the day.

I would argue that it definitely is unethical to keep cephalapods in captivity unless they have a big tank and some sort of stimulation.

Hey guys, I'm a big fan of AutoMicroFarm. I hope it's going well. Indeed it's a small business, but all our development effort is going towards breeding jellies in a scalable manner. Unfortunately there are inherent lead times because we're dealing with a living animal, but we're patient. Yes, we looked into other exotic animals, but it would be as off-brand and out of our expertise as trying to build a database for dog and cat buyers, so we haven't pursued anything else.

Thanks for bringing the concept of velocity to attention. I'd been looking for a metric just like this to compare Bitcoin to other currencies. It would be interesting now to compare the market cap of Bitcoin to currencies with similar velocity values. However, I think it would be really important to get a velocity value for Bitcoin only including transactions for goods and services, not including trading transactions with other currencies. Bitcoin's high velocity value could (and I suspect it does) just mean there is a lot of speculative trading going on and still very few real transactions in Bitcoin.

I just finished living the van life while running a company for two months. My goal was to wake up with a new view (and sunrise if I was ambitious) every morning and there are some fantastic ones in the SF Bay Area. (Little secret: the parking lot next to Chrissy Field is wide open and gets epic sunrises over Alcatraz.) It becomes naturally easy to go for a morning swim or hike before work. At least in San Francisco, there are a lot of people living out of RVs and vans and you start to follow their lead and find the good places to park. I bought a cargo van from an electrician and built a full size bed that converts into a seat and some shelves for my stuff. Coincidentally, I just put my van up for sale on craigslist yesterday, so if anyone wants to carry the torch, hit me up!

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/cto/3316494260.html

We've had all kinds of press for our site, radio, tv, newspaper, etc. We get bigger spikes in traffic being featured on blogs nobody's ever heard of with a link to our site than being featured in national outlets like NPR and LA Times where viewers have to remember to look us up online later. That said, the people who hear about you offline will find you weeks and months later and sometimes make a purchase over a year later. I agree, put a "Welcome Oprah Viewers" banner on your site. Also, you can run an adwords campaign for a few weeks to capture Oprah's viewers. Set up your keywords keeping in mind they're going to be googling phrases like "website selling chocolate chip cookies (or whatever it is you do) as seen on oprah tv."

Good advice. I use SkipJack and they rarely hassle me, even when I authorize very large sums or rebill. They've never held my funds. I also allow customers to use PayPal if they want and many of them choose to pay with PayPal.

I run an ecommerce business that sells jellyfish aquariums: http://www.jellyfishart.com

I know, weird. But jellyfish are a hot new trend in personal aquariums. We just started an affiliate program that is doing really well. Our affiliate commission is 5%, conversion rate is 0.25% and average purchase is $198. Would you be interested in signing up as one of our affiliates? We have banner ads you can run.

http://www.jellyfishart.com//affiliate_info.asp